To the Secretary Read online

  To my mother and father,

  Mary and Chet Thompson

  CONTENTS

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  PROLOGUE

  1. 251,287 LEAKED CABLES:

  Monday, November 29, 2010

  2. ANTI-AMERICANISM:

  Let’s Burn the Flag!

  3. CRISES:

  “Post Will Continue to Monitor the Situation”

  4. TRAVEL:

  To the Ends of the Earth

  5. FRENEMIES:

  The Faces Behind Diplomacy

  6. WILD ANIMALS:

  Noble Causes and Jungle Diplomacy

  7. CORRUPTION:

  Immunity, Impunity, and Impudence

  8. IRAQ:

  Diplomacy in a War Zone

  9. HILLARY CLINTON:

  The Good Enough Secretary

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  TO THE SECRETARY

  PROLOGUE

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  ONE MORNING IN THE AUTUMN OF 2010, I STOOD IN front of a group of university students, handling the by-now-easy routine of questions and answers that followed the information session “What Is It Like to Be an American Diplomat?” As the State Department’s New England Diplomat in Residence, I was one of a group of senior diplomats spread across the country, trying to connect with prospective candidates and demystify the route to becoming a foreign service officer. Diplomats in Residence appear at career days, as guest lecturers in international relations classes, and on panel discussions. Equipped with everything from glossy pamphlets to tablecloths, our job is to animate the role of an American diplomat. Most of us draw on our own years of experience and explain how foreign policy initiatives in Washington play out in our day-to-day work in embassies and consulates.

  I used each student’s question at the end of my talk to make a point about the foreign service, the selection process, the lifestyle, or how one moves through the ranks. Then came the question I was dreading.

  “I was wondering how you feel about the WikiLeaks cables? I mean, they are supposed to be classified and all that, but some of us have been following all these stories in the New York Times and we’re really fascinated by the cables they are publishing. Are they for real? Do you really get to go to weddings in Dagestan?”

  I thought wryly, why should my job today be any easier than that of my colleagues overseas, who were no doubt really scrambling? I was lucky—my audience was a group of genuinely curious graduate students; theirs was genuinely furious foreign ministers.

  I tried to place the leaked cables in historical context. I told the students that historians and other researchers rely on the FRUS volumes, the Foreign Relations of the United States, in which the government publishes cables and other official documents after they have gone through the declassification process. That process takes a long time and is always several decades behind current events. What makes the leaked cables so unprecedented is that they are available in real time.

  Another student looked worried. “Should we be reading them at all? I heard that someone at Columbia University asked about this and was told that if you admit you read them, it could bar you from getting your security clearance.”

  A discussion broke out. “But how can we not read them? They are right there in the New York Times. They tell us we have to prepare for the exam by reading daily newspapers and news magazines. It’s a free country and I’m not going to stop reading the newspaper!”

  Exactly.

  A student shyly raised her hand. “I knew you were coming today, so I looked for your cables, and I see that there are several hundred with your name at the bottom. Would you be willing to discuss some of the cables you wrote?”

  Now we really were getting into uncharted waters. Of course I had read the Times’s stories, but I had not thought about how the leaked cables would change the kinds of conversations I had with students. Would I suddenly be accountable for every leaked cable on the WikiLeaks website? Momentarily dodging the question, I took the easy way out, explaining that most of the cables that bore my signature reflected the tradition that chiefs of mission sign off on cables written by officers on their staff.

  My adventures that morning pulled me into the controversy in ways I hadn’t expected. As a Boston-based diplomat for my current assignment, I missed the chance to sit in the State Department cafeteria in the lumbering Harry S Truman building, more commonly called Main State (to distinguish it from the many annex buildings around Washington) to exchange views with my colleagues. Even more, I missed being at my last embassy in Prague where I could commiserate with fellow officers and think strategically with them about the unforeseen impact of what had just happened. As WikiLeaks quickly became the week’s lead news story, those who did speak out were mostly retired diplomats, and their take was one of outrage. As they harrumphed through the nightly news, I realized they hadn’t heard the teachable moment I had in the classroom, where one student had said somewhat wistfully, “But this stuff is so cool.”

  Five years later, the passage of time offers a calmer vantage point to assess what the leaked cables did and didn’t do to the world of diplomacy. When the newspaper-reading world awoke November 28, 2010, to read about the 251,287 leaked State Department cables, the scandal epitomized a digital information age replete with societies of hactivists, leakers, and outlaws. Most of the published cables were written between 2006 and 2010 and dealt with modern issues and contemporary leaders, the majority of whom were still in office.

  The media outlets handpicked by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange quite naturally explained the cables from a journalist’s perspective. They selected the most newsworthy cables—ones that would make headlines, raise eyebrows, and irritate foreign governments. As a result, cable excerpts that were gossipy, titillating, or sure to shock fueled WikiLeaks’ 15 minutes of fame (the five weeks between late November and the end of 2010).

  And shock they did. When the world got an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at what American diplomats had written, then–Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini, no doubt voicing the thoughts of many, said ominously, “This will be the September 11th of world diplomacy.” Even the journalists involved felt they had crossed a Rubicon. New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote in his introduction to Open Secrets, the Times’s book based on the news stories, “By the end of the year, the story of this wholesale security breach had outgrown the story of the actual contents of the secret documents, and had generated much breathless speculation that something—journalism, diplomacy, life as we knew it—had profoundly changed forever.”

  The story of the leaked cables is really 251,287 separate stories, many of which are routine, some of which are sensational. Under the terms of access granted by Julian Assange, competing media institutions suddenly had to find ways to work together—and to do so quickly. The newspapers were further challenged by the mercurial and temperamental personality of Assange, who alternately trusted and distrusted his chosen outlets and managed to get arrested on unrelated charges in the midst of the transaction.

  Assange and the media were not always on the same page. WikiLeaks’s culture draws on a profound anger against government institutions, an assumption of wrongdoing, and an anarchic dedication to radical transparency. Newspapers, at least those handpicked by Assange, have a more balanced approach. They share a sense of duty about exposing wrongful acts, but most reporters and editors at elite papers also take a professional pride in getting it right. They spend years developing high-level contacts in government and the diplomatic corps, something Assange and his followers did not have.

  The establishment media were slowed by legal and ethical fears of inadve
rtently revealing information about embassy sources that could put them in harm’s way. The New York Times went so far as to inform the White House of its intent to publish the cables on Friday, November 19, nine days before the release date, and within hours the Obama administration assembled a 120-person task force. Keller described a tense scene the following Tuesday, November 23, when three New York Times staffers met with an interagency group at the State Department. The goal of subsequent meetings and conference calls was to redact names and other identifying material that would endanger sources. In contrast to other leaks of this magnitude, the State Department was an active participant in the days before the November 28 publication, redacting names and identifying vulnerable individuals. It also focused on damage control, arguing (usually unpersuasively) that unflattering portraits of world leaders would strain diplomatic relations. While it could not avoid embarrassment, by working with the Times it would at least know the worst.

  The tight deadline was an important element in the drama, creating a race against time to get the cables into print. Assange’s collaboration with the London Guardian began in June 2010, with the release of military dispatches from Afghanistan and Iraq, published as the War Logs, beginning in July. Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger contacted Keller at the Times to propose a collaboration to share the enormous labor and to increase the impact. Assange later raised loud objections to any collaboration with the New York Times after it ran a frank and unflattering profile of him on October 24. He told the Guardian that he preferred the Washington Post but was overruled because the Guardian had by then established working relationships and shared expertise with the Times. Assange widened the media circle to include German news magazine Der Spiegel, French daily Le Monde, and Spanish El Pais. Adding more media increased the chance of leaks, and dissenters within the WikiLeaks organization had begun their own series of smaller rogue leaks to other media. Accounts by both Keller and Rusbridger of the weeks leading up to publication are stories not only of rare collegiality but of breakneck speed and stress.1

  And therein lies the problem. Even the best newspapers are by nature not reflective. They get one chance to publish and move on. Once a story is out, it is rare for a news organization to go back for a second look to add context, research, or additional quotes. This was particularly difficult for the WikiLeaks stories. No currently serving diplomats were allowed to discuss them or comment on the reaction to them since the cables were still considered classified. As a result, the WikiLeaks operation had an air of both haste and unfinished business. Barely a month after the story broke, the newspapers left it for the next big event.

  In some ways, the leaked cables did U.S. diplomats a favor. They brought to light the importance of their role and their descriptive powers and offered glimpses of the fascinating backdrop against which they work. The U.S. government may have been embarrassed by candid descriptions of world leaders, but the cables reveal diplomats who are eager to interpret people and developments on the world stage for bosses back in Washington. They contribute to the body of knowledge policymakers rely upon to make decisions. They also add pathos and drama to crises. Minutes after a major event they are out and about, describing the scene on the streets. They rival the best travel writers in their engaging descriptions of remote places. Some of their cables are very funny.

  With a few exceptions, the majority of cables discussed in the following chapters were written between January 1, 2006, and February 28, 2010, reflecting the end date of the tranche of cables that Private Chelsea Manning uploaded while stationed in Iraq. The vast majority were from embassies and consulates to Washington, offering a rare chance to hear from the practitioners and implementers in the field. WikiLeaks established a website, www.wikileaks.org, which contains a searchable database where all the cables can be read. Readers can search by embassy or consulate, by date, or by keyword. This leaves an almost infinite number of research possibilities. One could search for human rights, human rights in China, or human rights in China in 2008.

  The chapters offer nine glimpses into embassy reporting on issues, countries, and people of particular interest between 2006 and 2010. They also reveal some disturbing disconnects between Washington and the field. One of the legacies of the leaked cables is the dissonance they reveal between diplomats in embassies and policymakers in Washington. In an era in which America’s global stock was exceptionally low, diplomats sometimes found themselves communicating to a headquarters that could not hear them. While every institution must deal with bureaucracy, and a certain amount of tension between the field and headquarters is normal, the stakes from 2006 to 2010 were particularly high. A Washington bureaucracy shaken by virulent anti-Americanism was obsessed with countering it. The diplomats gamely tried but reported little long-term success and offered their own analysis of the underlying problems.

  As the students I’d addressed that morning in 2010 learned, this is the first time in U.S. diplomatic history that the public has had access to nearly the entire contents of four years’ worth of embassy and consular reporting in real time. It is also a rare chance to see the practice and conduct of American diplomacy through the eyes of those posted overseas.

  The cables depict two worlds that did not always align. Despite the Italian foreign minister’s cry that the leaked cables would mark the end of diplomacy, a better image might be a Through the Looking-Glass moment in which readers could see diplomatic activity as it unfolded, with all its challenges and frustrations, carried out by a competent diplomatic corps, many of whom excelled at descriptive writing. What follows is their story of how, from 2006 through 2010, foreign service officers patiently advanced multiple and complex sets of competing interests in American foreign policy and tried to explain the outcomes to an occasionally distracted audience in Washington.

  Chapter 1

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  251,287

  LEAKED CABLES:

  Monday, November 29, 2010

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  This disclosure is not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community, the alliances and partnerships, the conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and advance economic prosperity.

  —Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

  November 30, 2010

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  AT 6:30 A.M. ON MONDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2010, THE political officer at the U.S. embassy in Prague spun the dial for the third time, frustration at a maximum. The clunky steel Mosler safe contained her computer hard drive, without which there would be no cable writing. The tech team had reset the combination lock and she struggled to remember the new sequence.

  She was anxious to record her impressions from a recent reception. At this still-dark hour, no one else had yet arrived who might help. Writing a classified cable on her laptop and then transferring it onto the classified system was a security violation. So were several other workarounds she could think of.

  To get to the safe, she had already passed several checkpoints, beginning at the chancery entrance and post one, where a friendly new marine waved her in. She crossed the cobblestoned courtyard, long since accustomed to the oddly spaced stairs, designed for horses centuries ago when the building served as a palace. She coded in the cypher lock and climbed the elegant carpeted staircase, feeling a blast of welcome heat. At the landing, she took out her cell phone, forbidden beyond this point, and slid it into a cubby opposite rows of photos, mostly black and white, of former ambassadors, among them the mysteriously named Outerbridge Horsey. She punched in the second-floor code, crossed the foyer, and entered a third code to open the door to the political-economic section. Still ahead of her were a series of log-ons and passwords, and she made a mental note to forward calls from her cell phone in the cubby so they would roll over to her desk phone. But she still needed to retrieve her hard drive.

  She gave the safe an unproductive kick. The collection of scuff marks near the bottom at
tested to a long history of officers in a hurry. She looked blankly at the dial, hoping for inspiration.

  This was the state of embassy security in late November 2010. Foreign service officers sat through mandatory security seminars in Washington before being dispatched to the field. Once they arrived at their embassy, they were briefed again by the regional security officer, given badges to be worn at all times, and granted access—or not, depending on clearance level— to other restricted-access areas such as the DIA and CIA offices and the all-important SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), a room within a room and site of country team meetings, where the ambassador meets with senior officers and section heads from the many different U.S. government agencies that constitute an embassy. Large embassies may house representatives of more than two dozen agencies in addition to the State Department. Officers filled out clearance updates every five years and routinely sat with diplomatic security agents popping in to ask the usual questions about a colleague from a previous post who was up for security clearance renewal. Any unusual behavior—drugs, alcohol, financial problems?

  For years the milder security infractions had meant little, but by 2010 the State Department had changed. Woe betide the officer who left a classified document on his desk. Once the safes were locked for the night, officers flipped wooden in-boxes upside down and topped them with tent cards that read NO CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS! Marine security guards, whose mission at embassies is to protect such documents, patrolled determinedly in the dead of night looking for security violations. Unlucky officers who left a classified document out overnight arrived the following morning to find a dreaded pink form. Absolution required a meeting with the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and a lot of contrition. The State Department was now noting violations on an officer’s permanent record, and too many incidents might bar a promotion, a coveted DCM assignment, or even an ambassadorship.